Microsoft

Mac users don’t care about mac apps like they used to. Today and the future is a web platform world with JavaScript at the center morphing into this gigantic blackhole (mainly a gravity metaphor) with everything else being pulled into its orbit. The more Mac users there are, the more Mac apps we should see. The problem is, the users who really care about good native apps — users who know HIG violations when they see them, who care about performance, who care about Mac apps being right — were mostly already on the Mac. A lot of newer Mac users either don’t know or don’t care about what makes for a good Mac app. John Gruber also quoted SwiftOnSecurity regarding Microsoft’s switch to Chromium as Windows’s built-in rendering engine, saying: This is the end of desktop applications. There’s nowhere but JavaScript.

If you’ve been watching the news, you know that the latest data breach involved Marriott exposing 500 million guest reservations from its Starwood database. The kicker is that the unauthorized access to the Starwood guest database stretches back to 2014. That’s FOUR YEARS of unfettered access to this database! It’s breaches like these that helped motivate the team at the Cryptography Research Group at Microsoft to be “extremely excited” to announce the release of Microsoft SEAL (Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library) as open source under the MIT License.

Big rumor coming out of Redmond this week: Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, which uses a similar rendering engine first popularized by Google’s Chrome browser known as Blink. I’ve long been a proponent for browsers differentiating at the feature/integration layers and teaming up at the rendering layer, so I view this as good news. What do you think?

New GitHub CEO, Nat Friedman: I’m thrilled to share that the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub is complete. 🎉 Monday is my first day as CEO. Millions of people rely on GitHub every day, and I am honored by the opportunity to lead this company. He goes on to share the two principles for GitHub and these three objectives that are at the top of his mind moving forward: Ensuring GitHub is the best place to run productive communities and teams Making GitHub accessible to more developers around the world Reliability, security, and performance

A year ago, Business Insider said “You may never have heard of GitLab…” as part of their announcement of their Oct. 2017 raise of $30 Million (no valuation was provided then). This year, Microsoft changed that by putting this market on high alert with their acquisition of GitHub for a whopping $7.5 Billion. …over 100,000 code repositories were moved to his platform from GitHub following the news of the Microsoft acquisition. Sid said “the deal served as a ‘wake-up call’ to developers, giving them the impetus to look at competing platforms” — like GitLab. The deal also served as a wake up call to those who had been investing or wanted to invest in GitLab and bring the money to them…Sid was quoted on TechCrunch saying: …GitLab’s original plan was to raise a new funding round at a valuation over $1 billion early next year. But since Iconiq came along with an offer that pretty much matched what the company set out to achieve in a few months anyway, the team decided to go ahead and raise the round now. What’s interesting is that I can recall a time when GitLab was known in developer circles simply as a straight up, open source, GitHub clone. Continued development, great leadership, and a $1.1 Billion valuation later…they have been cemented as a serious GitHub contender.

Tom Warren writing for The Verge: Microsoft is testing a warning for Windows 10 users not to install Chrome or Firefox. The software giant is in the final stages of testing its Windows 10 October 2018 Update, and testers have spotted a new change that appears when you try to install a rival web browser. “You already have Microsoft Edge – the safer, faster browser for Windows 10” says a prompt that appears when you run the Chrome or Firefox installers on the latest Windows 10 October 2018 Update. Yes, the update in the article makes it clear that this is only being tested, but to me, that doesn’t excuse this type of shady behavior. Why is this being tested in the first place? Unfortunately for Microsoft, invasive and creepy conduct like this will only make people steer clear of its browser and other products.

We’re on location at Microsoft Build 2018 talking with Corey Sanders and Steve Guggenheimer — two Microsoft veterans focused on artificial intelligence and cloud computing. We talked about the direction and convergence of AI, ethics, cloud computing, and how the day to day lives of developers will change because of the advancements in AI.

We talked with Steve Dower and Dan Taylor at Microsoft Build 2018 about the history of Python at Microsoft, the origination of IronPython, Python Tools for Visual Studio, flying under the radar to add support Python, fighting from within to support open source, and more.

Big week! KBall, Nick, and JBall (nooch) dive deep in to the 2018 Node.js user survey results. What does it all mean?! They also review Ryan Dahl’s “10” regrets about Node and sound off on Microsoft’s assimilatio… err… acquisition of GitHub.

Our friends at Tidelift have joined data from GitHub and their own Libraries.io, “the largest open source software dataset in the world,” — which covers over 2.8 million open source projects. They were able to combine the two datasets to gather the entire commit history of each project on GitHub to more closely examine the following questions: What exactly has been Microsoft’s role in the open source community? In which projects and ecosystems have they contributed most? Have those contributions been focused on the large Microsoft open source initiatives, or has the company also participated in projects beyond their immediate purview? They were also careful to clean the dataset of forks and duplicate packages which would misinform this analysis. So what’s the verdict? Microsoft may have a mixed history with open source, but today the company is demonstrating some impressive traction when it comes to open source community contributions. If we are to judge the company on its recent actions, the data shows what Satya Nadella said in his announcement about Microsoft being “all in on open source” is more than just words.

No other details were shared in this tweet, but this image from the stage of WWDC says all it needs to. In a post-Microsoft + GitHub world — it has been a crazy 24 hours for GitLab. More than 2,000 people tweeted about #movingtogitlab. We imported over 100,000 repositories, and we’ve seen a 7x increase in orders. We went live on Bloomberg TV. And on top of that, Apple announced an Xcode integration with GitLab. Here’s an interesting exchange between Emily Chang and Sid Sijbrandij on Bloomberg Technology: Emily: I spoke with Satya Nadella earlier today, and he said “he promises to put developers first.” Do you not believe him, or do you think it’s not possible for a company with so many objectives to really put developers first? Sid: I believe him. Microsoft has shown that it is the new Microsoft, and they’ve done great. The new CEO, Nat Friedman, shows he really understands developers. So I believe him when he says they are going to be good maintainers of GitHub. Emily: So, then what’s so bad about GitHub? Sid: There’s nothing bad about GitHub. Emily: What’s so much better about GitLab? Sid: It’s a fundamentally different product. It’s open core, so a lot of it is open source. You can host it yourself. But second and I think most importantly, it’s not just code hosting. With GitHub you host your code. GitLab is the entire DevOps lifecycle. So all the way from planning something to rolling it out, container registries, monitoring — all in a single product. That allows you to get the whole organization on the same page. And that’s why people are flocking to it. They go on to talk about being a sustainable business, financials, etc.

If you haven’t yet, you should watch this. It’s 8 minutes long and packed with insights from Sataya himself on why Microsoft bought GitHub. We are all in on open source and that’s what really brings us together with GitHub — and we’re going to operate as an open platform for any language, any framework, whether it’s the cloud or on the client. Nat Friedman, who’s going to be the CEO of GitHub post close, came to Microsoft from Xamarin — he’s someone who’s a veteran of open source and he’s going to lead the company. We’re going to operate GitHub as an open platform, and most developers are going to judge us by our recent actions and our actions going forward — and we will have to earn the trust everyday. We’re very committed to it. At the core, Microsoft is a developer tools company. This is something that comes very natural to us. Earning the trust of our customers by our actions everyday is what we live by. The most important thing is that it’s not just about Azure. We welcome every cloud provider to integrate with GitHub in order to be able to reach the GitHub community — and give GitHub members a choice of any cloud, as well as any client, mobile platform, or IoT platform.

Hear insights and reactions from Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo as they break down the news of Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub — from speculation to confirmation — including commentary from members of the developer community by way of Twitter and Slack.

The news is true. Microsoft is acquiring GitHub and is expecting the agreement to close by the end of the year. Chris Wanstrath writes on the GitHub blog: When GitHub first launched ten years ago, I could have never imagined this headline. Their focus is on the long tail and the developer. What hasn’t changed, however, is our focus on the developer. From the beginning, we have been obsessed with building a product for the people using it. We want to make developers more productive and we want more people to become developers. So as we look to the next decade of software development and beyond, we know it’s all about the developer. The relationship that has formed between GitHub and Microsoft is years in the making. …as we’ve gotten to know the team at Microsoft over the past few years through collaborating on projects from Git LFS to Electron, we’ve learned that they agree. Their work on open source has inspired us, the success of the Minecraft and LinkedIn acquisitions has shown us they are serious about growing new businesses well, and the growth of Azure has proven they are an innovative development platform. Better together. …most importantly, we both believe we can do greater things together than alone As part of this change, Nat Friedman will be taking on the role of GitHub’s CEO. We have been searching for a new CEO for some time and found in both Microsoft and Nat a partner we believe will strengthen and grow the GitHub community and company over the next few years. We have been in the trenches for years covering the dramatic shift of Microsoft. Here’s a fairly comprehensive list of our coverage shared in an issue on a trending repo on GitHub. If for some reason that issue gets deleted I have archived the list here.

Well, it’s official. The only thing standing between us and a Microsoft-owned GitHub future is regulatory review. The implications of this acquisition are broad-sweeping, but the way it’ll actually play out is still unclear. Here’s what Satya Nadella says: We recognize the community responsibility we take on with this agreement and will do our best work to empower every developer to build, innovate and solve the world’s most pressing challenges. Addressing one of the big questions on developers’ minds, Microsoft states: GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects — and will still be able to deploy their code to any operating system, any cloud and any device. I’m not quite sure what operate independently means in practice. GitHub has been searching for a CEO for months now. How independent do they want to remain?

On Friday, Business Insider reported that Microsoft has held talks to buy GitHub. Matt Weinberger writes for Business Insider: GitHub is a $2 billion startup that claims 24 million software developers as users. On the most surface level, the logic of Microsoft buying GitHub is pretty clear. Developers love GitHub, and Microsoft needs the love of developers. Here’s the current speculation… If Microsoft were to acquire GitHub, it would mark a significant change of course from where the startup stood just six months ago. As recently as late 2017, insiders said GitHub was fully committed to staying independent and eventually going public. It’s also possible that instead of striking a deal to buy GitHub outright, Microsoft may make an investment — possibly with an option to buy — and allow one of its top engineers to be poached as CEO. h/t Dan McClain for sharing this in Slack.

We’re on location at Microsoft Build 2018 talking with Julia White, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft — a 17 year Microsoft veteran. We talked with Julia about her take on this “new Microsoft”, Satya Nadella’s first appearance as CEO when they revealed the first glimpse of Microsoft’s cloud offering which started with Office, the beginnings of Microsoft Azure, Azure as the world’s computer, and how every company is becoming a software company.

At Build 2018 Microsoft open sourced their Azure IoT Edge runtime to give developers the ability to create smart edge applications. The announcement came, but it seems the readme on the repo says it is pending an official open source release. The second version of Azure IoT Edge is in public preview. We intend to open source the code when the product enters general availability and will place the code here. Either way, we’re excited about what’s to come.

We’re back in NYC at Microsoft Connect(); talking about the backstory of Visual Studio Code with Julia Liuson (Corporate Vice President of Visual Studio), Chris Dias (Principal Program Manager of Visual Studio and .NET), and PJ Meyer (Product Manager). We talk about the beginnings of the Visual Studio product line, how Microsoft missed the internet, how the community is judging Microsoft and looking at them with a very old lense, how Visual Studio Code evolved from lessons learned with their cloud based editor called Monaco, how they had to radically change to reach developers beyond Windows, and how this open source project is thriving.

We talked with Miguel de Icaza last week at Microsoft Connect(); in New York City. Miguel gave us the backstory on how he’s been competing with Microsoft for most of his developer career, and he shares the history of GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin — and what led him to now work at Microsoft.

In this episode of The Future of Node series recorded at Node Interactive 2016 Adam talked with Gaurav Seth (Lead Program Manager of Chakra &amp; TypeScript) and Arunesh Chandra (Program Manager of ChakraCore) about the backstory of Node at Microsoft, their polite fork of Node to introduce the community to ChakraCore (the high-performance JavaScript engine that powers Microsoft Edge), why Microsoft is so interested in Node, the future of Chakra and ChakraCore, VM neutrality, and more.